Tag: mouth

After spending 4 days recently taking a class called “Addressing the Skull,” I want to get you onto my massage table so I can practice, practice, practice! It’s the best way I know to integrate training into, well, my advanced integrative bodywork practice.

I also need your help naming this new addition to my repertoire. I want to describe it separately from a Zero Balancing session. In my view, a ZB session addresses the whole body, including the head, whereas a skull/cranium/crown session spends most of a 45-minute session on the head.

This was a class in Zero Balancing, which aligns your structure and frees your energy, but most of the session will be spent addressing your skull. I learned lots of secrets of the skull, including that working on the outside of the skull affects the inside, i.e., the brain. And it’s not exactly a massage. It uses artful touch and knowledge of anatomy to find those places that release tension you may not have even known you had.

For instance, there is a place behind your ears that is similar to that place where dogs love to be petted, behaving as if they could never get enough, leg twitching and groaning with pleasure.

There are several special places on your skull where two or three or four bones come together that just love to be touched.

I imagine that everyone in the class experienced several releases of tension in their skulls that they were not aware of before. We can get so habituated to stress that it gets normalized. Guess what? Normal can be better. (Thanks to San Antonio ZBer Jamie Carmody for making “Make normal better” her tagline.)

I suspect this work may prevent headaches and migraines.

After four days of training, which included many trades, my friend and I noticed that we could see better. When looking into our training room, the 3D-ness of everything was in sharper relief, and everything had more clarity. Working on the head affects all the senses.

This is your brain, on ZB.

I plan to run this special for a couple of weeks, and may consider extending it after that. I’ve lowered my price by $25 for a 45-minute Zero Balancing session. Go here to book yours.

You have four jaw muscles: the two large ones on the outside of your head (the masseter and temporalis) and the four small ones inside your mouth (two medial pterygoids and two lateral pterygoids).

Any of them can get trigger points.

What is a trigger point? Healthy muscle tissue is made of bundles of fibers that run in the same direction. This tissue is pliable. It stretches or contracts when you move.

A trigger point is a spot where the muscle tissue has lost its pliability. A massage therapist may feel that the fibers in a particular spot have become glued together and hard, creating a small nodule. The tissue feels denser and often rolls under the fingers, compared to healthy muscle tissue.

This causes that band of muscle fibers to become shorter and tighter, restricting full range of movement of the entire muscle.

If you can’t open your mouth wide, or move your jaw easily left and right, forward and back, you may very well have trigger points in your jaw muscles.

Trigger points usually feel tender when you apply pressure to them, and they may also refer pain elsewhere. They may also form “constellations.” This makes them the tricksters of the nervous system.

You can work on your own trigger points to release them. It helps if you’ve received trigger point work from an experienced massage therapist, but you can learn to do it yourself. Even then, you may prefer to have someone else work on them, especially if you have a lot of them in multiple jaw muscles.

It is written for laypeople to release their own trigger points, but I know many massage therapists who use it as a reference book in their offices.

When I am working on TMJ issues, I notice that many people have trigger points in their masseters, the big external jaw muscles on the sides of your face that run from your cheekbone to the bottom of your jawbone.

Here’s how to find trigger points in your own jaw: using a bit pressure, drag your fingers slowly down the masseter muscle on one side of your face. Do this several times, experimenting with adding pressure, and notice if there are tender spots or “roll-y” spots. Repeat on the other masseter.

If you don’t have masseter trigger points, this usually feels pretty good.

Source: The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook

If you find trigger points in your masseters (and you can still have TMJ issues without them), there are several ways of treating them.

Some therapists apply a huge amount of pressure. I don’t recommend this because if you have TMJ issues, your jaw is probably already out of alignment, and this could make it worse.

A better way, in my opinion, is to use less pressure. Yes, you can gently release trigger points!

I learned to do this from a local (Austin) massage therapist who is very experienced with trigger point release. She’s worked on me and released many trigger points, teaching me how to do this in the process.

If you have a lot of trigger points, I highly recommend seeing her. She works intra-orally, as do I, but her experience is greater than mine, and she’s amazing at discovering patterns if you have “constellations” of trigger points. She’s going to be more efficient than I can possibly be. She is the queen!

If you are interested in having her work on you, her name is Rose of Sharon, and you can reach her by phone or text at 512-282-1672. Please leave a message with your name and number so she can contact you.

I am back in the office after several days of serving as a teaching assistant for the training in TMJ and the cranial base. This class was taught by Christian Current, who did a great job teaching this for the first time. I’ve taken this class as a student twice from Ryan Hallford since 2013. They’ve both taught me a lot.

Christian is my officemate, along with Denise Deniger, who just completed this series as a student. It was a pleasure to be able to assist him and to share time with all of these biodynamic and classical craniosacral therapy students over the past 18 months. I’m looking forward to our study/practice group!

I’m also practicing the techniques I learned in the Upledger Institute’s classical craniosacral therapy classes and am signed up for another class in mid-August.

Between these trainings and several years of practice, I can help with many mouth and jaw issues of pain and alignment.

I’ve become aware that a lot of folks simply live with “issues in these tissues” because they don’t know that help is available. A dentist may recommend wearing a mouth guard for TMJ problems, but this only protects the teeth from grinding away.

Real, lasting help means working with the muscles that hold the bones in place. Just as you can lengthen your hamstrings by holding a standing forward bend for a few minutes, a bodyworker trained in mouth work can guide the small but powerful muscles around your jaw to lengthen.

The work is gentle, slow, and precise. It should never hurt. You can signal me at any time to remove my gloved finger from your mouth.

This work can be helpful if you’ve had braces or a bridge that crosses the midline of your upper teeth. Dentists are not usually aware of the craniosacral rhythm, and braces and bridges can affect the alignment of your cranial bones.

Other reasons to seek out this work include having experienced facial or head injuries, including concussions. Curiosity is another good reason to come in!

I am running a special offer this summer: Come in for 60-minute craniosacral therapy sessions and pay $70 each. Just go to the home page and click the link to book your first appointment online. You’ll get an email confirmation, and you can opt for a text reminder the day before.